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The Connector Podcast - Transforming Regulatory Compliance: Building towards DORA readiness with Marissa from DORAedge by Performativ
Unlock the secrets to navigating the future of fintech with Marissa from Performativ and DORAedge on the Connector podcast. Gain valuable insights into how emerging technologies transform wealth management and regulatory compliance, especially in light of the upcoming Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA). Discover how Performative pushes the boundaries with DORAedge, a groundbreaking tool engineered to support financial entities in meeting DORA's rigorous standards.
Join us for an enlightening discussion as Marissa explains how DORAedge simplifies mapping an organization's supply chain and managing contractual agreements, ensuring seamless risk identification and compliance reporting. From understanding the proportionality principle to categorizing micro-enterprises, Marissa breaks down what DORA means for smaller financial entities. Whether you're an independent wealth manager or part of a larger institution, this episode offers indispensable strategies to fortify your digital operational resilience and governance. Don't miss this opportunity to bridge the gap between technology and regulation in the evolving financial landscape.
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Koen Vanderhoydonk
koen.vanderhoydonk@jointheconnector.com
#FinTech #RegTech #Scaleup #WealthTech
Welcome to the Connector podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Ko e n as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:Welcome to another podcast of the Connector, and today I've got Marissa w with me from Copenhagen, Performativ , but also DOR , can you please explain and tell us who you are?
Marissa Weiss:Yes, absolutely. Thanks for having me, k oen . .. I'm Marissa. I work on the commercial team at Performativ, as you said, here, based in Copenhagen. We are traditionally known in the market for being a wealth management software solution provider. We have a core offering that we offer to independent wealth managers across Europe, as well as bespoke solutions that we develop for larger financial institutions. At the end of the day, our solution enables wealth management businesses to operate more efficiently and streamline their total operations from back to front.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:Amazing, but you're also launching a regulatory compliance product, DORAedge. That's a little bit different than what you just explained about WellTech, so what's the deal?
Marissa Weiss:Sure, we actually think building a tool DORAedge to help entities across the financial sector comply with the Digital Operational Resilience Act is really well-suited within our broader tech suite. So we're building DORAedge to help independent wealth managers, but also regulated entities across the financial sector, with becoming compliant with Dora.
Marissa Weiss:This is a tool not only to help them prepare for the upcoming regulation that goes into effect this coming January 2025, but, also maintain a higher level of digital operational resilience and, overall, enhance and improve their risk posture and their governance in terms of managing their entire compliance program. So we built this platform to really enable not just the narrow part of the market, which are the independent wealth managers, but a wider array of companies with leading technology to help them achieve this goal.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:Well, interesting, and I can believe that many of the smaller financial institutions which you mentioned, the independent financial advisors, they are also confronted with a large thing to do with DORA. But what exactly does DORA dge do then?
Marissa Weiss:Dor edge is a platform that's helping risk and compliance teams, from small organizations within the financial sector all the way to larger ones, in streamlining their operations the financial sector all the way to larger ones in streamlining their operations. So what it does is it provides a register of information, a way for an organization to go in and identify their entire supply chain network, from their internal systems that they manage in-house to their external provider network, so they're able to map out all of those different relationships, the contractual agreements that they have and the services that they receive and identify risks that make up that entire operation. Beyond that, though, within DORA, there's a huge element regarding standardizing the reporting, so not just continuous monitoring, but also annual reporting requirements, and how we've built DORA dge is that every single field that is an input for an entity from a data perspective directly contributes to the template that the regulators need to see for that output from a reporting standpoint, and I believe that's a very complex template, isn't it?
Marissa Weiss:It is, and we try to make it as easy as possible for entities, especially those with pretty small operation teams, to be able to manage their risk and compliance ops, to be able to hopefully not spend too much time but rather can spend their time really thinking about centralizing that data, making it apparent to the entire organization and ensuring that they're able to report in a really efficient way.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:Well, these are all obligations that come in DORA, but does the same apply for quote unquote, a smaller independent financial advisor?
Marissa Weiss:Absolutely so. Dora impacts all regulated financial entities, so independent wealth managers and other financial entities will be, of course, impacted by DORA. There is a couple of terms thrown around, one, the proportionality principle, as well as micro enterprises. So there are a couple of criteria that will categorize certain entities as micro enterprises, one being in regards to their FTE as well as their annual turnover balance sheet assets. So that's under 10 FTE as well as 2 million euros. But from that of course there is kind of an array of entities that can fit in, sort of the small to medium up to the enterprise size. So there is, of course, variations in terms of the reporting requirements.
Marissa Weiss:But the overall implications of DORA is to harmonize the way in which entities across the financial sector think about their digital operational resilience, the suppliers that they choose for the services that they need to deliver critical functions as a part of their offerings, and really assess are those providers up to snuff?
Marissa Weiss:Have we assessed our contingency plan if they were to go financially bankrupt, if they were to have an outage or disruption to their service which would have a material impact on your own operations? So, although smaller financial entities might not have as rigorous of reporting requirements from an incident management standpoint through their entire register of information, their supply chain mapping, the entire framework is to say we have a standard and all entities of any scope, complexity, size and type will have to still comply to a certain degree. DORAedge offers a dedicated framework for Dora compliance with our own proprietary control library to make sure any financial entity knows which contracts are in place, which policies that they have and the way that DORA stipulates. Beyond all of the data entry, we also have a really robust incident management and reporting function where we're leveraging AI to help categorize incidents that come in writing, descriptions for them and helping to track in terms of the notification period for developing reports that need to be sent out to the competent authorities.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:Marisa, may I ask you a very simple question, Because it's super complicated. And if you think about it, what if you would summarize for an IFA what would be like the key things that they need to take into account? If they still need to get started before January, what would that be?
Marissa Weiss:What's unique about DORA is that it harmonizes the risk frameworks for all organizations within the financial sector, regardless of company type, the offerings that they provide.
Marissa Weiss:So wealth managers, even if they are quite small, are just as impacted, if you will, as other alternative asset investment managers, crypto asset servicing companies, payment providers, insurance companies, and the list goes on. For smaller firms, DORA might be the impetus finally needed for those organizations to comprehensively review and bring structure to their ICT risk management framework. They'll need to identify, manage, monitor risks, in addition to enhancing their overall oversight to their third-party ICT providers. So they might have not thought too hard about which vendors they're using for outsourced services and at this point, with DORA right on the brink of the new year, they'll need to do a comprehensive review of their existing outsourced providers, the contracts and service level agreements they have in place, and make sure that they do achieve the compliance standards that are set out in DORA. That also goes to any new vendors that they're thinking of adding to their register. They'll need to also make sure that they get up to the same standard that DORA sets out for their existing contracts.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:So it's pretty much a continuous thing, isn't it?
Marissa Weiss:Absolutely so. It's not just getting ready for January 17th, but it's making sure that you not only can maintain that level of compliance, but also use that as a general understanding of your overall risk posture and the need to identify what potential risks could come up so that you can resolve those in due time.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:And how do somebody become a customer of DORAe dge?
Marissa Weiss:A very simple question and continuing to develop it with weekly functional releases to make sure that it is at full potential and really well suited to support entities of all sizes and one getting ready for DORA in January, but also where they're able to maintain their overall risk and compliance program as it pertains to DORA's reporting requirements from there on out.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:And while we talked about performative in the very beginning, how do the two actually relate to each other and how does it work for performative customers?
Marissa Weiss:Absolutely so. Performative customers will have access to DORAedge for free. They can start to sort of test it out and get up to speed on the platform really quickly. For anyone else who isn't currently a performative customer can again go to our website DORAedgecom, begin their trial seven or 14 days so they can start to invite their team and begin using the platform in its full use. From there they'll sign up for an annual subscription and have a license to DORAedge from there on out.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:Interesting. I hope we're going to have a lot of subscriptions after this podcast because I do hear that need a lot in the market. Now coming back to Performative, because we didn't really deep dive into Performative you mentioned once it's a portfolio management system, but could you also share a little bit of insights? What is Performative? What do you do? What is the ambition?
Marissa Weiss:Yeah, so Performative. We have a cloud-native, entirely SaaS platform for independent wealth managers to manage their entire wealth management operation. We pull in custodian data, we pull in market data, sustainability data, anything that a wealth manager needs to see to see their client's total wealth. So, with that total portfolio view, we have a really sophisticated metrics engine that runs pretty intense calculations and actually is able to power really robust visualizations in both an advisor portal as well as a client-facing app. So for independent wealth managers who might have not found a solution that suits their needs maybe they were solely working offline in Excel or used a legacy system that was quite clunky, potentially way more expensive than what they needed it to be we were able to build Performative to deliver on the mission of really supporting this segment that otherwise was overlooked in the market and having something that was agile that could grow with their business overlooked in the market and having something that was agile, that could grow with their business.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:You are headquartered in Denmark, Copenhagen, but how does the journey look like? What is the market that you would like to be active in? Where are you active already today?
Marissa Weiss:We're live in a handful of countries across Europe. We're always looking to expand on that where we have clients with a need, whether that is independent wealth management firms or other institution types like banks, who we can support with our offering, either in using our core platform or developing bespoke solutions that can fit into their existing tech stack. We, of course, are based in the Nordics, so have a presence here, but we're also widely known within the DAC as well as the Benelux regions. With that, we know each jurisdiction has its own regulations and we definitely do look to make sure the platform is able to be adopted and suitable to suit the requirements within those different markets. But overall, the way that we've built the performative platform is that it's quite modular in how it's powered, so we're able to work with every unique client that we onboard and to make it suit them in the way that they need it to.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:And it's a very practical one. Maybe coming back a little bit on DORA edge, you said that they could apply for a trial period and get the customer on the website, but how can they contact you if they want to really go fast track?
Marissa Weiss:Absolutely so. I will get every single email if you d D o But if you want to send me a personalized note at connect@doraedge. com.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:Oh, brilliant. Thank you very much again for joining us. Thank you also to the audience and please stay tuned. More news from the fintech industry. Thank you very much.
Marissa Weiss:Thanks, Koen.
Koen Vanderhoydonk:Bye-bye, bye.
Speaker 1:Thanks for listening to another episode of the Connector Podcast. To connect and keep up to date with all the latest, head over to wwwjointhekonnectorcom or hit subscribe via your podcast streaming platform.